Over the roof of the neighbor’s house and through the branches of our backyard jungle and into the window where I sit and write: the Saturday morning sun

I wander out for breakfast

The sidewalks are full of young bodies

Up all night?

I’m driven crazy by their tight jeans

Blind I’ll no longer worry about my invasive male gaze

Song World opens early

The owner’s setting out a box of cheap CDs

I bought Coltrane and Johnny Hartman from him last week

We share a few pleasant words

The vista opens up right where his shop is

Where the boulevard curves

Glare on the windswept river

As if Maya’s flesh beneath her dress were incandescent

Borul and I meet in Mount Edzo

“My head,” he says

In his palm: three yellow tablets

He says, “I know I’m in trouble”

He points at the table

“Look at the aura around those scratches”

I stand on a bridge squint into the wind imagine the thing on my eyelid a big blob of something where nothing should be a big redness growing past the margins of vision til the light of pastness is the only light I see

As if the lightbulb in my windowless room has a broken filament

My memory will be my image-base

And my memory is bad

This is way over the top

I stop for a cup of tea at Mystery Glyphs

They’ve got a little show up by my friend the young photographer

I don’t know why he calls it Old Time TV Stars

It’s all self-portraits except a photo of a Japanese garden bridge by the side of a pool in which there are big orange fish

One table over two women talk

I think they’re social workers

“The ward is a war zone,” one says

“The patients are crazy their families are crazy the doctors are crazy the administrators are crazy the nurses”